I've been working on SoundFingerprinting [1] for almost ten years now. Its Shazam for developers. First 8 years I worked mostly during my free time and weekends. 2 years ago, I decided to monetize the storage for the fingerprints. There is a MIT licensed version of the storage [2], and a commercial one [3], which is fine-tuned for thousands of hours of audio or video content. If you are an enterprise customer, you will essentially need it at some point, and will most probably have no problems paying for it.
Overall I invested a lot more time in it than the monetary reward I received. I don't complain since I enjoy working on audio/video fingerprinting and databases. On top of it, the pay at this stage is on par with a regular SE job with the bonus of working on things that I enjoy. I can call it a bootstrapped business now.
In some sense, I think about opensource similar to the work of art. You do it because you genuinely like to create/build things and showcase them to the general public. You don't do it because of the monetary reward. A good writer is one that has to say something, not one who writes for the sole purpose of getting on the NT bestselling list. Opensource is similar.
Nice to see an open source audio fingerprint. I once interviewed at Mediaguide (now defunct?) who scanned radio broadcasts so they could sell reporting to advertisers when their ads ran, and record labels when their songs played. There's probably a ton more applications.
Radio/TV broadcast analytics is the most frequent use case. At least I receive a significant amount of questions regarding it, so the library has been optimized for this task. YouTube ads detection is also an interesting case that falls in this category.
Other use cases are divided between game development, repeating content detection, robocalls detection, or just iOS/Android apps for Shazam like style features.
Surprisingly a couple of times, I was asked about recognizing birds by their singing. The library can't do it, but it is something I am thinking about exploring one day.
> Surprisingly a couple of times, I was asked about recognizing birds by their singing. The library can't do it, but it is something I am thinking about exploring one day.
Overall I invested a lot more time in it than the monetary reward I received. I don't complain since I enjoy working on audio/video fingerprinting and databases. On top of it, the pay at this stage is on par with a regular SE job with the bonus of working on things that I enjoy. I can call it a bootstrapped business now.
In some sense, I think about opensource similar to the work of art. You do it because you genuinely like to create/build things and showcase them to the general public. You don't do it because of the monetary reward. A good writer is one that has to say something, not one who writes for the sole purpose of getting on the NT bestselling list. Opensource is similar.
[1] - https://github.com/AddictedCS/soundfingerprinting
[2] - RAM-based storage, bounded by memory limits
[3] - https://emysound.com